Crazy New Jersey

Public Policy Polling made a bit of an unnerving discovery during recent polling in New Jersey. Of course, no matter how out of whack you might think New Jersey is, this kind of trend is probably not limited to one state.

"We've been uncovering a remarkable level of anger toward Barack Obama in a lot of our recent polling so for New Jersey we decided to go a step further in determining how extreme some people's feelings are about the President and asked respondents if they think he is the Anti-Christ.

8% said yes. 13% aren't sure. Among Republicans 14% said yes and 15% weren't sure."

Obviously, I'm not the biggest fan of Mr. Obama, but is he the Anti-Christ? Well, lets say I have my doubts about that. The fact that more than 20 percent of people in New Jersey (and keep in mind, that's a Blue State) think it's possible that he could be the Anti-Christ is another disturbing sign of the extreme radicalism that is sweeping the nation.

Then again, there's always the possibility that this kind of a result shows one of the weaknesses of public polling: you can't trust the responses people give. If I had the chance to compare a politician to the Anti-Christ in an anonymous phone survey, even if I didn't think it was true, I might answer yes. So maybe that accounts for a few percentage points in that one particular poll, but the larger trend remains a concern.

The cross-tabulation of the survey provides some interesting findings as well. The eight percent of people who said Obama was the Anti-Christ were evenly split between males and females (8 8% in each respective group), but young people (ages 18-29) overwhelmingly said yes (24%). Given young people's penchant for shenanigans, I'd say you can chalk a lot of that up to the issue I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Finally, Hispanic people (24%) apparently are much more afraid of Obama being the Anti-Christ than white people (7%) are.

PPP says they will be asking the same question in a nationwide poll this weekend. And in case you're wondering how they came up with such a crazy question in the first place, well, like all good things these days, it came from Twitter.

As for extremism in New Jersey, PPP's found some other scary facts too:

"The extremism in New Jersey isn't limited to the right though. 19% of voters in the state, including 32% of Democrats, think that George W. Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11.

Beyond that 21% of respondents, including 33% of Republicans, express the belief that Obama was not born in the United States.

Combine the birthers and the truthers and you've got 37% of the electorate. And the 3% of voters who really need to get their heads checked are the ones who are both birthers and truthers."

So it doesn't seem to matter which side of the political spectrum you're on; there's a growing crowd of crazies. Rational debate over actual issues becomes increasingly impossible in such an environment, and with fewer reasonable people making reasonable arguments, the extreme voices get louder and garner more attention. This should be concerning for anyone who cares about liberty, because extremest positions (of both the right and the left) usually don't favor freedom.